First Stop on the Road to Forever
by Selena
Summary: When the Enterprise crew inadvertently changes history through the Guardian of Forever, Michael Burnham's journey is abruptly cut short. To Uhura, the new arrival is a mystery. To Scotty, she's a threat. And more than one timeline might be at stake...
1. Chapter 1

****Disclaimer****: Characters and situations currently owned by CBS.

****Thanks to****: Likeadeuce, for the valiant beta-reading.

****Timeline****: during __City at the Edge of Forever__ for the TOS characters, just after the s2 of __Star Trek: Discovery__ finale for Michael Burnham.

****Spoilers****: until the episodes indicated above.

* * *

**I. Prologue**

Since joining Starfleet, Uhura had experienced her share of hair-raising situations. Her life had been threatened more than once, both on a general level, due to the ship she was serving on being under threat, and on a personal one. More than once, she'd faced a lethal weapon aimed at her. She liked to think she handled herself well under pressure.

She had never been as deeply, existentially frightened as now, doomed to watch images of Earth's history flitting by after her Captain and Mr. Spock had disappeared into the strange portal in pursuit of Dr. McCoy. Dr. McCoy, who'd somehow managed to alter history to an unfathomable degree. There was no more Enterprise in orbit above them. As far as Uhura could ascertain, having tried her best to make contact on any frequency she knew, there was no more Federation , or at least none that had listening posts within range. Uhura was well familiar with the butterfly theorem. For all she knew, every single person she'd ever known and loved might have ceased to exist, at least for now.

"Well, there's nothing to it," Montgomery Scott said. "Nothing but wait." He'd been left behind with her, as well as with security officers Galloway and Lehane; the Captain had told him that if nothing changed and there was no sign history was restored after an appropriate waiting time, each of them was to follow through the portal and try as well, but individually, to heighten their chances.

"Well, at worst, we'll all end up in pre warp drive America," Galloway commented. "There are worse eras, right?"

Uhura knew that he was only trying to keep up morale, but at that moment, she could have slapped him. "For a white man," she said sharply, then caught herself. They could very well be the last survivors of a wiped out timeline. They were in this together.

"Mr. Scott," she said, forcing herself to sound cheerful, retrospectively making her remark into a quip although it hadn't been intended as such, "tell me you're not curious to figure out how exactly this portal works. If nothing else, it must be an unprecedented marvel of engineering, and from a civilization we know nothing about, too. That sounds like your kind of challenge."

Scott gave her a tense smile; she could see he understood what she was doing. "Aye," he said, "and..."

Which was when a sudden, red flare between them and the portal nearly blinded Uhura. Instinctively, she dived behind the next rock. Then she looked again, and blinked. A figure in an armored suit had appeared, two arms, two legs, with the odd mechanical wings unfolded behind it echoing various saurian-based species, at least in looks. For a moment, it hovered about a meter above ground. Then it crashed down on the surface while a voice cried: "No!"

The universal translator was a fantastic invention, but Uhura had trained as a linguist. She prided herself on recognizing a great many accents within the Federation, and back at the Academy, her classmates had challenged each other by playing ever shorter aural clips to identify. One syllable was pushing it. Still, she was reasonably sure it was a human voice she'd just heard.

"Identify yourself," Uhura said, while Scott and Galloway kept their phasers trained at the new arrival.

The figure rose again, opened its helmet, revealing a human-looking female. "Commander Michael Burnham, USS Discovery," the woman said, sounding frustrated, concerned, and not a little angry. "Who are you?"


	2. Chapter 2

Guiding __Discovery__ through space and time had taken all of Michael's focus. There hadn't been room for anything else: not the grief she'd otherwise have felt at leaving Spock behind, and the universe she'd known with him. Not relief that finally, her mission could succeed and the universe would not be wiped out of all sentient life, nor the hope of finding the first of her mothers in the future she was rushing towards. She was arrow and bow at the same time, and until her task was accomplished , there was nothing else.

Until __something__ pulled her out of the time stream. The wormhole she'd opened collapsed into itself, gravity kicked in, and she found herself on an unfamiliar planet with a small group of humans staring up at her, all wearing the new uniforms the __Enterprise__ crew had sported. Wherever, __whenever__ she'd ended up, this wasn't nearly far enough. Control could, would still find them here. It had all been in vain.

Her suit's dating system had gone haywire; it wasn't possible to get a read on a stardate. Michael tried to contact __Discovery__, and heard nothing, so her ship had not followed her to this place. She decided to regard this as a good omen instead of an indication __Discovery__ had not made it, had been destroyed. No, her ship __was__ still hurtling towards the future, albeit without her to guide it. And wasn't the presence of these Starfleet personnel proof Control was gone, at least for now?

The sole woman in this particular landing party addressed her, and when Michael gave her rank and name, demanding identification in return, said: "Lieutenant Uhura, USS Enterprise. I must tell you, Commander, that there is no vessel named __Discovery__ in the fleet. I'm in a position to know. "

So this wasn't the present anymore, but, as she had earlier guessed, the near future. __Enterprise__ at least had made it. Michael released a breath she hadn't known she'd held. "I didn't expect to ever see a member of your crew again, Lieutenant," she said. "Is Captain Pike still in command? If so, I'd like to talk to him."

Now they all stared at her once more. "Chris Pike hasn't been Captain of the Enterprise for a decade", one of the men said suspiciously.

__Don't ask whether he's still alive__, Michael told herself. If she'd arrived in the future she'd anticipated, everyone she ever met, outside of the crew coming with her, would have been dead, not due to some catastrophe but simply due to time. Besides, as long as __Discovery__'s fate was uncertain, as long as there was the slightest chance that Control could still gain the data it wanted, her mission was not yet done.

"And Mr. Spock?" she asked. "Is he still your science officer?"

"He is," Uhura replied quietly, her eyes not leaving Michael's face. "He's also gone through the portal behind you, along with two more officers. In fact, the entire Federation seems to be gone right now, so please understand, Commander, that we're very surprised to find you here. "

This time, Michael couldn't shield herself. She fell on her knees and gasped. It couldn't be. Desperately, she tried to cling to logic. If these people hailed from a Federation under siege and almost wiped out by Control, they'd look different. She remembered returning from the Terran Universe only to find the Federation in a fight for survival against the Klingons that had reduced everyone to a state where they only expected enemies. She remembered Admiral Cornwell bording __Discovery__ armed to the teeth, ordering Sarek to perform a mindmeld without even a second wasted on asking for permission. By contrast, these officers appeared cautious and somewhat disturbed, but nowhere near that level of desperation.

"Look, lassie," one of the men said, whose accent reminded her uncomfortably of Lorca pretending to be an engineer, "I'll give it to you straight. As far as we know, time's been altered, and the sole reason we're still here is because this planet is in a bubble that's been shielding us from the effect of the time change. At least that's what our Mr. Spock said before he left to set it right again, along with the Captain. So either you are from the changed timeline, or you're some kind of mind game this planet is playing with us, and not here at all but an hallucination. It's been that kind of year. Mind letting me take a look at that suit of yours so I can see whether it's real? Because it doesn't look like any Federation technology I'm familiar with, that's for sure."

For the second time, Michael stood up. "I'm sorry," she said. "But I can't let you do that. Not until I've found out more about what happened. In the wrong hands, this technology could do terrible harm."

She turned around, and examined what Uhura had referred to as a portal. A different timeline, a parallel universe; this was possible, as she knew all too well. But it wasn't the only explanation. She could still be in the future of her own timeline. In either case, she couldn't just hand over her mother's invention to strangers, even if they were wearing Starfleet uniform and were comrades to at least some version of her brother.

Her brother, who was currently trying to set time right. Again. She didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. In the end, she did neither.

"Guardian," Uhura said suddenly, seemingly speaking into the air. "Is Commander Burnham here because of the time change?"

A voice replied that vibrated all around her and had no origin she could detect. "All strands are unraveling. "

"This isn't helpful", the engineer muttered.

"They may yet weave together and become whole again", the voice continued, unperturbed, then fell silent, and remained so despite Uhura coaching it to say more. Michael used the time to scan what she saw in front of her with her suit's instrumentation. There was energy of a type not unlike the time crystal she was carrying, yet far stronger. The visual imagery flitting across its surface was strangely earth-centric , yet even while she thought that, it altered to show, as far as she could tell by the brief glimpses, events featuring Vulcans and Klingons as well. When the binary stars appeared, she tore her eyes away. She would not watch Philippa die a second time.

Something else occurred to her then. If she and these people truly came from different timelines, then she might well cease to exist once their Spock and their Captain succeeded in restoring their version of history.


	3. Chapter 3

Uhura studied Burnham. There was something about her name that was familiar, and yet she couldn't place it. The name of Burnham's ship, too, resonated with her, though Uhura , who knew all the call signs of Federation vessels by heart, had not lied about being certain there was no USS __Discovery__ in Starfleet at this point. She tried to think back to whether there had been a "Discovery" in the earlier days of space exploration. It was an obvious name to call a ship, so there must have been. But not since Uhura had become a cadet at Starfleet Academy, a year after the Klingon War had concluded.

Perhaps it wasn't Burnham's name that was familiar, though. Perhaps it was her quiet intensity, the precision of her phrasing which struck the linguist in Uhura as almost Vulcan. The way she carried herself right now, tilting her head as she studied the portal, her eyes widening just for a minuscule second as if realizing something where the rest of her face remained unchanged.

Discreetly, Uhura used her tricorder to scan Burnham. The woman was entirely human; no traces of Vulcan DNA in her. And yet. She __had__ asked after Spock.

"What is your Federation like?" Burnham began abruptly. "Is it at peace?"

Her voice sounded deceptively casual.

"More or less," Uhura replied. "There's the occasional skirmish with the Klingons. But we haven't been at war since before I entered the Academy. Commander, if you want to know whether we're in your future or not, why don't you just ask me for the stardate - well, the one that existed before we beamed down on this planet? We could compare and contrast from there."

Burnham gave a tiny smile that made her look somewhat younger than Uhura had originally estimated. "I salute your logic, Lieutenant Uhura, and admit I was fishing. Now will you tell me the stardate?"

There it was again, that familiar cadence in the way Burnham pronounced "logic". Uhura wasn't given to generalization, and she'd met Vulcans other than Mr. Spock. They did not all share the same speech rhythm. When she opened her mouth to reply, Scott held up a hand. His eyes had narrowed.

"Wait a minute. Burnham! Now I've got it. Michael Burnham. Knew I'd heard that name before. I was still a cadet when the Klingon War started, and lord, but we talked of little else for a while. Battle of the binary stars. You're Burnham the mutineer!"

"Hang on", Lehane, who'd until then kept himself to frowning, miserable silence, exclaimed. "I thought Burnham the mutineer was a made-up story they frighten cadets with to make them stick to First Contact protocol? That's what they told me anyway. Michael Burnham never existed. That was just Klingon propaganda to justify their attack on our ships."

The woman in front of Uhura didn't flinch. "I __am__ Michael Burnham", she confirmed, sounding neither defensive nor proud, just simply stating a fact. Now both of the security offers looked stunned. Galloway's hand hovered around his phaser until he dropped it again.

Uhura had heard about Burnham the cadet legend as well during her academy years, come to think of it. But when she'd looked up the name in Starfleet records, she hadn't found it anywhere, so she'd concluded the story was no more true than that tale about Admiral Archer's unaging beagle travelling through space and time and had forgotten about it until now. "Well," she said, deciding to test a speculation of her own, "you're no longer Starfleet's only mutineer, at least in our timeline. Considering Mr. Spock hijacked the Enterprise in order to bring Captain Pike to Talos IV and got court martialed for it."

"He did what?" There was no restraint in Burnham's attitude now. Her eyes were wide as saucers, and she seemed appalled and amused at the same time. Then it was as if a sponge wiped out all that emotion. Her face went blank and she sighed. "Of course he did."

"You're not asking me why he did it", Uhura observed, even more intrigued. Burnham looked from her to Scott.

"I went to Talos IV with Spock once", she said. "So did Captain Pike. If they went back there, they must have had good reason. Let's leave it at that. But if you know about my mutiny at the Binary Stars, then it seems we are from the same timeline, after all."

Uhura shook her head, and chose to ignore Scott who grimaced, pointed and all but shouted to the skies he wanted to draw her aside and tell her something Burnham couldn't overhear. "Not necessarily. Because you see, Commander - you truly do not exist in our records. And our Mr. Spock never mentioned you, either."

Which actually didn' t mean anything; Spock was a deeply private person. As far as Uhura knew, he hadn't spoken of his time with Captain Pike to anyone, including Captain Kirk, before deciding to put his career, all their trust in him and his own life on the line in order to give Christopher Pike an escape from being trapped in a body crippled beyond anything medicine could do. For all that she occasionally teased him when everyone was recreating in the mess hall, Uhura had never felt the urge to pry for more. It wasn't her story to know, any of it.

But right here, right now they could very well face the irreversible loss of the entire universe she'd lived in so far, and the arrival of Michael Burnham had given her something else to focus on than to wait and ponder that possibility. It had even given her hope. If Burnham was part of the altered history, it proved there was still a Federation out there, and while living among people who were almost, but not quite those she'd known and loved would hurt, it was better than facing a universe still at war, or one where several sentient species had managed to wipe each other out. If Burnham was part of their own timeline, she'd still come here from the past, which meant that time travel through means other than through the portal was possible, and maybe that, in turn, meant another way to rectify whatever had gone wrong once Dr. McCoy had fallen into history. So Uhura decided to solve the mystery of Burnham, and that meant pushing against that closely guarded facade to learn the truth.

Michael Burnham regarded her again with that so familiar inscrutable expression. "I cannot imagine someone knowing Spock, any version of Spock, and being surprised at him withholding information, Lieutenant."  
Scott laughed; it was more of a brief snort, and truth be told, he didn't look very amused. "She's got you there, lass. Can we have a word now? Alone?"

"By all means, " Burnham said courteously, not reacting when Scott told Galloway and Lehane to keep an eye on "the situation" while he and Uhura were gone. She went back to studying the portal. The strange suit she was wearing caught the light of the stars, and for a moment, she seemed to flicker like the images the portal kept showing.

"Listen", Scott said urgently once they'd gone far enough to consider themselves out of earshot, "I understand what you're trying to do. Establish a rapport, get her to confide in you. But if that's truly Michael Burnham..."

"She'd still be Starfleet, though, wouldn't she?" Uhura interrupted. "If she's not a story made up to teach cadets. And if nothing else, what Spock did proved that you can mutiny while still being considered an exemplary officer. She could be the ally we urgently need in this situation, Mr. Scott. And that suit..."

Scott shook his head. "That suit is a fine piece of work, a true beauty," he said. "If we had time, I'd dearly love to meet whoever made it and shake their hand. But you know what is at the back of it? What powers it? I've had quite a look at it while you were talking to her, and I'm as sure as I can be. It's a time crystal, Uhura. A stable time crystal. That's as rare as one of Zefram Cochrane's first sketches for the warp core, that is. I've never met someone who actually held one in his hand. Except for one. Remember that Mudd fellow? I got drunk with him early on when he'd come on board, and he mentioned a few things."

"Harry Mudd was a con man, a thief and a liar", Uhura said sceptically.

"To be sure. And he's got a really long record. And I looked, because I wanted to know, and guess what? One of the offenses he's wanted for was abuse of a time crystal, together with hijacking a starship and attempted murder. "

"And this is relevant to Commander Burnham because...?"

"The name of the starship he tried to hijack wasn't there. Which is odd. But it was mentioned where he got the crystal from. The Klingons. See, what he'd said in his cups was that there's one planet, and only one, where time crystals grow naturally, and it's within the Klingon Empire."

Finally, she guessed where he was driving at.

"So you think Commander Burnham must have made a deal with the Klingons to get her time crystal?"

"The mutiny and starting the war wasn't the only thing she was famous for when I was a cadet", Scott said, the frown on his face ever deepening. "Before she disappeared from the records, she was reinstated. Decorated, even. There was a big ceremony, I remember this much, when the war ended. She got credit for making peace with the Klingons. Well, as much as we're ever at peace with the Klingons. Now I'm just an engineer, not a Vulcan saying "logical" all the time, but to me, something stinks. I'm thinking maybe she got captured and turned. Maybe this whole planet here" - he gestured around them - "was a trap, from the beginning. Klingons bear a grudge. They'd love to get their hands on the Captain and Mr. Spock, that's for sure. And changing history so there's no Federation? Why, they'd like nothing better, surely."

Uhura couldn't deny this was at least a possibility, but she also saw a flaw in his theory.

"None of this would have happened if Dr. McCoy hadn't had an accident when trying to patch up Mr. Sulu", she pointed out. "We'd all be gone and on our merry way but for a slip of his needle. There's no way anyone can plan for an accident like that, include it in their calculation."

"Not unless they can travel in time and have already watched it happen", Scott said.


	4. Chapter 4

In a sea of disturbing things, Michael discovered a new one: There was no sense at all of the suit, or herself, being pulled forward. Or backward, for that matter. Her mother had only been able to remain at any point in the past for a few hours before being pulled back to the era she'd originally been stranded in. Michael herself had set the signals in the past she'd meant to and been immediately pulled back to her point of origin before programming her final, future destination. Which had never been cancelled. By now, she should have needed to actively fight against being pulled towards it. But the instrumentation showed - nothing. And everything. It was still going haywire; as if time had been suspended.

Perhaps __Discovery__ had disappeared, wiped out of existence by whatever happened that Spock had gone to rectify, as these people feared the Federation had been. Perhaps the sole reason why Michael was still there was because the suit, mid-flight, had honed in on the origin of the time shift.

Or perhaps her earlier suspicion was correct; she herself was the product of a new timeline, and would stop existing soon. Become a myth again. Her mouth curved. A story to frighten cadets into obeying the rules; not the career she'd envisioned by joining Starfleet. But the idea of the rest of them - Saru, Tilly, Stamets - of all her friends having become not even memories anymore; this felt almost as wrong as never seeing any of them again.

One of the two guards left with her, Lehane, was biting his lower lip as if wanting to talk to her, but when she caught his gaze, he flushed and looked away again. The other one, Galloway, just watched her with a frown. Michael decided to ignore their evident distrust; she simply didn't have the time to win them over.

She tried to do what the Lieutenant earlier had done, talk to the entity addressed as "Guardian". "You said things may yet weave together. Will I be able to leave again if they do? Will I be able to find my ship again?"  
"You are a strand," the voice said. "They are another. Only one strand can run through time."

It refused to say more, at least for now. There was a theory in Michael's mind she'd tried her best to suppress as soon as it occurred, but now she found it impossible. Garvak's law of multiple timelines coexisting might not apply here. Instead, it might be a case of two overlapping entities, only one of which could exist. In which case the key to her crew's survival might be these people failing to.

"I don't think it experiences time the way we do", the returning Uhura commented. Her face was very serious. The engineer next to her looked grim as well. "Not in a linear manner. We might not even share enough reliable parameters for our communication with it to make any sense. At least not yet."

She had to be the team's communication specialist. "But most of these scenes are earth-centric," Michael said, gesturing towards the portal. "And my universal translator needed no adjustment when I got here. Which means that there should be enough shared parameters."

She'd visited a parallel universe running in tandem with her own before, Michael told herself. And it evidently had done for untold years. And chances were she was misunderstanding what this "Guardian" meant in any case.  
"If you tried to leave right now," Uhura suddenly asked, "do you think you could?"

"I might end up catapulting myself into non-existence", Michael replied truthfully, though she didn't add that with her instrumentation going haywire, she might not be able to in any case.

"Maybe you should reconsider letting Mr. Scott here take a look at your suit. He's a truly gifted engineer," Uhura suggested. Her tone was matter of fact, but something in her dark eyes still looked very troubled. There was something familiar about her right then that Michael needed a moment to place, and when she did, she was filled with a strange mixture of loss and amusement. Amanda. Amanda had been an expert at doing what this woman had just done, getting Sarek to do something she'd wanted him to do all along just by steering the conversation that way.

Michael opened her mouth to repeat what she'd said earlier, that she couldn't risk this technology falling into the wrong hands. But the thought of Amanda had reminded her of something the second of her mothers had advised her to do more than once, to consider a situation from her opposite's point of view. It was clear the engineer at least already distrusted her, and why not? She was a stranger who had started one disastrous war, then dropped by out of nowhere just moments after this landing group had discovered the entire universe they'd known might very well be gone.

"Mr. Scott," she said instead, "what is your take on A.I.s?"

He blinked, presumably not having expected this question, then shrugged. "They're useful. Up to a point. Shame about the Control disaster, of course. The entire Starfleet communication net work having to be rebuilt from scratch meant a lot of hands-on training for us cadets, though, when I was a lad."

"If Control happened in your timeline as well," Michael said, not knowing whether she'd feared or hoped it would have, "then you must understand why I can't risk you entering a report on my suit into the a Federation data base. However reworked the communication network is by now."

"Are you sure it's not a report on that Klingon time crystal you don't want me to enter ?" he shot back, and when Michael belatedly realised what he was suspecting her of, she couldn't hold back a snort though she managed to contain the rest of her laughter. Her wild, desperate laughter.

She wondered whether Ash Tyler was still alive, right here and now. Maybe he had been, before time got out of joint. Or maybe in this version of reality, he'd never stopped being Voq.

Lieutenant Uhura raised a hand. "This is getting us nowhere," she said. "I'm not an engineer. But I do remember the prohibitions against running all data through only one channel. On the other hand, I also trust Mr. Scott here to recognize a Klingon crystal when he sees one. Commander, could you just tell us how you got it? And Mr. Scott, how about taking an oath not to make any notes anywhere if the Commander does let you look at her suit?" She took one step closer to Michael. "You'd trust the oath of a fellow Starfleet officer," she said, her voice both imploring and challenging at the same time, "wouldn't you?"

Impossible not to think of Lorca right then and there. "You could have simply asked," she'd told him, shortly before his death, "and we'd have helped you to get home."

Instead, he'd lied and manipulated the lot of them, her included. He'd probably have found her suggestion laughably naive, if he'd wasted a second of thinking about it. Had she grown more paranoid than Gabriel Lorca by now?

"I would," Michael said, the words loosening something tight inside her. "And I hope - I really hope - that we can help each other."

Uhura smiled at her; she had a dazzling smile, full of warmth and relief. The two other men with the Enterprise landing party looked at Uhura, then at Scott, then back to Uhura again. Scott harrumphed. Unbelievably, he seemed a bit flushed. "Yes, well," he said. "You have it. My word, that is. But I'd surely love to have a look at your suit. And know where that crystal came from."

"The precise location is not my secret to tell," Michael said. "But yes, it is of Klingon origin. And no, the Klingons don't have time travel as such. They're just afraid we do, and because of that fear, I lost my birth parents. This suit is my mother's work, Mr. Scott, and as I __am__ still attempting to save the universe with it, I'd appreciate any help I can get."

Mr. Scott had his arms folded, but she could see the eagerness in his eyes, fighting with the suspicion. If Tilly were here, she'd have made friends with him already. I __will__ see you again, Michael thought at Sylvia Tilly, currently hurtling towards time and space, for there was no time line and no universe where Sylvia Tilly did not exist. She would not allow it.

"Saving the universe, eh?" Scott said. "Why, lass, that's what we do on most weeks, so you've come to the right place."


	5. Chapter 5

"So there really is a Burnham," Lehane said to Uhura, watching Burnham and Scott investigating the suit, now that Burnham had taken it off, with Galloway evidently burning with curiosity but keeping a respectful distance all the same. "Do you believe that story she's just told?"

"I've met my share of liars. She doesn't strike me as one of them", Uhura returned, not bothering to add that supreme liars never did. It would have been hair splitting. She did believe Michael Burnham. The way her story tied into the infamous Control disaster would explain why mention of her and her ship had been purged from the record. Besides, Uhura stood by her opinion as she'd voiced it to Scott: this was just too reliant on accident and over elaborate to be a Klingon plot. Besides, if the Klingons had access to time crystals and no compunction about changing history, why were they all living in a timeline where the Klingon Empire hadn't conquered the universe? Well, at least they used to live in one.

Out of her suit, Burnham was wearing simple battle fatigues. She hadn't lost that aura of intense focus as she conferred with Scott, both of them now looking from the suit to the portal. Uhura was reasonably well versed in technology that involved communication; she had to be. She could have repaired a Universal Translator, but time travel physics were beyond her, and so she'd withdrawn. Her own gaze wandered back to the portal, and she thought she caught a familiar landscape; the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. But the images flitted past as quickly as ever. She hadn't thought about her wider family in years; they weren't particularly close. But now she wondered whether her cousin Ole Kwai whom she used to visit at Ndian was even alive in this altered time, had existed at all, along with those family holidays she spent there. It was yet another reminder, as if she needed one, of what was at stake.

"So she started the Klingon war and she finished it, and we only know of her as some type of troll story for cadets," Lehane stated. "That sucks. If I was her, I'd be pissed."

"The Commander probably has other priorities right now," Uhura commented, though she didn't disagree. Without much hope for success, she decided to try the Guardian again.

"Can you show us any of the individuals who have entered this portal today?" she asked, since their names might not mean much to this entity.

"There is no today," the Guardian replied, and Uhura could have bitten her tongue, because she should have known, had known, had even voiced it herself earlier that it might not experience time in a linear fashion, and that their shared parameters were limited. Then, however, it surprised her by adding: "But there will be again. The strands are weaving together."

Burnham interrupted her conversation with Scott. "Didn't you say that only one strand could weave through time?"

"Only one", the serene voice blithely retorted. "Made of many. One."

"Infinite diversity in infinite combination", Burnham murmured. "Of course."

Uhura couldn't resist. "Or, in less philosophical terms for the rest of us: cooperation is key", she commented, with a pointed look at Scott, who looked a bit sheepish, as well he might. If it had been up to him, they would have wrangled Burnham out of her suit like thugs. If they could have. Burnham looked as if she could have defended herself at least long enough to make a run for it, whether to some other point on this planet or through the portal, as a drug-hazed Dr. McCoy had done.

She still wanted an answer to her original question, though. "Guardian, __can__ you show us the individuals from our group who entered this portal?" she rephrased her question.

"You have seen them. You will see them again", the entity replied, and Uhura all but sighed. She had recorded the flitting images on her tricorder for a while, as Spock had done earlier, but while she could slow them down, it would take a lot of time to go through each frame looking for the Captain and the others.

Scott, however, suddenly stood very still. "Hang on," he said. "I think - this could be..." Lowering his voice, he said something to Burnham, who frowned, then nodded, with a slow, tentative smile appearing on her face.

"Mind sharing with the rest of the class?" Galloway called.

"Give us five more minutes, will you, lad," Scott returned. "We've got to run some calculations, and I cannot bend the laws of physics."

Burnham looked inscrutable again. "In my experience, that very much depends on which universe we're in, and whether spores are involved," she said, deadpan. This, Uhura thought, was what Vulcan teasing sounded like; it had taken her a while, but she'd gotten the hang of it. Whatever her biological origins, she was now sure Commander Burnham must have been raised on Vulcan.

After some more low key exchanges between her and Scott, Burnham turned towards the rest of them again. "We think we may have a solution, at least for me. If we're right, what happened earlier was this: when the first of your landing party entered the past, inadvertently creating a new timeline, it affected the time stream like a wave, and knocked me of course. Then, when your Captain and Mr. Scott went through the portal, thus also entering the time stream, my suit recognized Spock due its earlier connection to him and brought me here as a last effort. "

When recounting her tale earlier, she had mentioned Spock had helped her during the battle with Control, so Lehane and Galloway just accepted this. Uhura would have had further questions, but now was not the time, she told herself.

"Which is why," Scott took up the explanation, "I think that if the Commander makes just a wee time jump back to the moment __before__ she originally arrived, the moment the Captain and Mr. Spock entered the portal, when it was at its most active, it might jump start her suit again in the right direction. Into the future. That instrumentation of hers still can't focus on much right now, but as it turns out, it still can focus on Mr. Spock."  
Uhura frowned. "If the suit can still travel backwards, at least for a short temporal distance, wouldn't it be easier to go to the point when the landing party first beamed down?" she asked. "Commander Burnham could then prevent Dr. McCoy from ever entering the portal in the first place."

Burnham shook her head. "Leaving aside possible paradoxes, I might just have this one jump. And the portal needs to be active to boost my crystal again."

"Time travel is a headache," Lehane grumbled. "No wonder temporal research is forbidden." He and Galloway were still eyeing the suit with some longing, sending envious glances Scott's way as he was helping Burnham to put it on again. As it was outside her expertise, Uhura did not consider herself banished from stepping closer, and she did have something else to say, which had nothing to do with time travel technology.  
"How are you, Commander?"

Michael Burnham shook her head. She really didn't seem to understand the question. "What do you mean?"

Uhura looked at the woman in front of her, once more clad in imposing technology that dazzled Mr. Scott, and suddenly felt the overwhelming urge to hug her. "Look," she said. "I know nothing about time travel, but I can do simple math. By what you told us, you've been running yourself ragged for a least a subjective day in your timeline, going from a lethal battle to showing up at different points in time and space through a method that sounds a lot like bungee-jumping on quantum waves. And given you knew you'd have to do that, I bet you didn't sleep the night before, either. I wouldn't have been able to. And that's just the physical aspect. You said yourself, you didn't expect to see anyone from your time of origin again, other than your crew, who is currently lost to you. Commander, you must be utterly exhausted, and frankly, I think before doing any more universe-saving time jumps, you ought to take a break."


	6. Chapter 6

The protest was half way on Michael's lips before her mind caught up with her. Yes, she was running on adrenaline, but nobody took a nap mid mission, and she'd stay awake far longer. She was capable of more if needs must.

Against her will, she remembered Lorca again, spending most of the time on board the other universe's __Shenzou__ being tortured and still capable of bringing his scheme to completion the moment she'd involuntarily given him the chance to. She'd gone from trusting and admiring him to despising him once she'd found out the truth, but she had never quite managed to lose the habit of seeing him as the challenge to live up to, not even now that he was dead.

"There is no time", she said quietly. Lieutenant Uhura gestured towards the sky.

"Look around you, Commander," she said. "There is nothing but time. Unless our people in the past manage to fix it. If you're travelling back, it doesn't much matter whether you do it now or in an hour. Isn't that the beauty of time travel? And an hour rest could give you more strength afterwards."

Once, while posing as the other Michael Burnham, she'd ordered Lorca out of the agony booth and into her room under some pretense, just so he'd have a bit respite from the relentless torture. He'd protested at first, and not knowing he was all too familiar with torture as the one to order it, she'd told him anyone had a breaking point, that she wasn't being sentimental but just looking out for the mission by giving him this short time free of pain.

"You remind me of someone, Lieutenant," Michael said ruefully, and for the first time, she allowed herself to feel a bit of the bone deep weariness inside. Uhura smiled at her.

"You remind me of someone, too, Commander."

"I doubt it's the same person," Michael said. "Very well. A short break, before I go. No more than an hour, maximum. If you have rations, I'd be grateful, I don't think I've eaten in - well, a while. But I can't go to sleep."  
"Then let me make an alternate suggestion. Am I wrong to assume you're familiar with Vulcan meditation techniques? They might help you relax at least somewhat."

Michael looked around again, at the portal, the eerie ruins where every bit was bound to incite her curiosity if she stared at it too long, and doubted very much she'd be able to go into a proper meditation. __Of course you could__, Sarek's voice whispered inside her. __I taught you how. __

His katra was still with her. Would it be once she'd arrived at her final destination, at a point where Sarek himself would be, beyond the shadow of a doubt, gone forever?

"These are... less than ideal circumstances," she told Uhura, hesitating, while one of the men handed over a field ration stick which, as she tore it open, tasted as ghastly as field rations had ever done, but undoubtedly added protein and sugar to her blood.

"Maybe," Uhura said gently. "Let's sit down, and let me try something. "

Michael folded her wings and gingerly sat down, still munching, Uhura kneeling opposite of her. Then the Lieutenant started to hum, just vocals, no words, and a soothing melody Michael was unfamiliar with. It occurred to her it would be ideal for being played on a Vulcan Ka'athyra.

"You have a beautiful voice," she murmured and allowed the music to envelop her. When was the last time she'd listened to a Ka'athyra? Or any kind of music? Uhura's voice guiding her, Michael closed her eyes and let go.  
Only a short time later, it seemed, she felt someone touching her on her shoulder. Michael opened her eyes, and saw at once that the stars above them had changed position, which meant the planet had.

"I'm sorry," Uhura said, "but I know you wouldn't forgive us if we let you rest for longer than an hour. Besides, it's soon time for the first of us to follow through the portal. Our people haven't come back yet."

Again, Michael checked the position of the stars. An hour, earth standard, seemed about right. A part of her felt embarrassed. The rest of her was grateful, because if she was exhausted enough to be lulled to sleep under these circumstances, she'd have been in no condition to meet greater challenges later without refreshment. Uhura had been right.

"Thank you," Michael said, rising, and found herself clasping Uhura's hand. She could see concern on Uhura's face, and was willing to bet it was for her missing crew members. "I __had__ need of this."

"Good to know I know my Vulcans," Uhura returned, and despite the worry, there was also a sense of mischief dancing in her eyes. So she had guessed. She was, undoubtedly, an insightful woman.

"Is Spock happy?" Michael asked impulsively. Uhura struck her as observant enough to ask.

"That's a human question."

"So it is," Michael said, and extended the wings again, checking the instrumentation which still refused to provide her with any future coordinates but did allow for a jump within three hours back into the past.

"I think he's where he wants to be," Uhura said seriously. "More than that, I wouldn't presume to know." The mischievous gleam returned into her gaze. "But meeting the mystery woman of his life now certainly has provided me with some teasing material for our Mr. Spock!"

These people were a promise, Michael thought. A promise of what the future she was trying to save would hold. "I hope they still have recordings in the era I'm going to," she said. "Because I would very much like to hear your voice again, Lieutenant Uhura." With a crooked smile, she added: "Do add it to the Federation data base. Unlike time travel technology, I can't imagine anything but good coming out of it."

Then she took her leave of Scott, who swore again he wouldn't make a report on the suit but grumbled that it was like keeping the existence of Zefram Cochrane's first warp drive sketches secret. He also repeated for her the exact stardate at which their comrades had entered the portal, and Michael counterchecked it for the last time with her coordinates. The other two Enterprise crew men cautiously offered their good wishes.

"I'm so telling my mates that Burnham the mutineer was real, though," one of them said. It was the last thing Michael heard before she accessed the forces that had taken her mother Gabrielle and returned to the past.

It was a matter of seconds; she found herself hovering almost exactly where she'd left, she could see Uhura, Scott, Lehane and Galloway standing together as they had done earlier, but the energy surge from the portal had her instruments going berserk again. Michael flipped the switch that would allow the time crystal to absorb it, reentered the coordinates her mother first had given her, and only then did she allow herself to turn her head and look. All she could catch in the corner of her eye were two figures disappearing into the void. Then they were gone.

"Good luck," Michael whispered, not knowing whether she meant them or herself. Then she opened a wormhole again.


	7. Chapter 7

Uhura had never been as deeply, existentially frightened as right now, watching her Captain and Mr. Spock disappear into the strange portal in pursuit of Dr. McCoy. But she didn't have the time to let the fear consume her. Not even to battle it. There was a flash, something red, an energy blast of sorts that made her grip Scott's arm even while he was gripping hers, both of them instinctively closing their eyes.

When Uhura opened hers again, she thought she must be hallucinating. Kirk and Spock were jumping through the portal, McCoy following.

"What happened, Sir?" Scott asked. "You only left a moment ago."

"We were successful," Spock replied evenly. The Captain didn't say anything. Uhura hadn't seen him with such an expression on his face since Gary Mitchell had died.

"Time has resumed its shape," the Guardian's voice said. "All is as it was before. Many such journeys are possible. Let me be your gateway."

Uhura didn't waste a second. She immediately called the ship and felt a dizzying sense of relief when __Enterprise__ answered, asking whether the landing party was ready to be beamed up.

"Let's get the hell out of here," Kirk said shortly. Doctor McCoy no longer showed signs of his involuntary drugging, but his expression, too, looked like thunder. Whatever happened in the past couldn't have been good. But time was restored, the universe Uhura knew was back again. After she relayed the Captain's orders to the ship, she looked at Spock. There was a sense in her that she wanted to ask him something, but even while the transporter began reducing all of them into atoms, the thought disappeared.

It only returned to her much later, when __Enterprise__ had left the planet's orbit, and Kirk had made a report for her to send to Starfleet, asking to declare this era of space a quarantined zone. She was with Spock in the recreation room, and he'd taken out the instrument Uhura had dubbed his Vulcan harp. By now, the crew had learned that they'd almost been wiped out of existence, and the universal mood was that of relief and celebration, though everyone understood that the Captain wanted to be alone and did not participate.

"Mr. Spock," Uhura said, "I've been wondering. Call it a vanity project, but these events have reminded me how precious each moment is. Not just the big ones. And how quickly time passes. Would you mind making a musical recording with me? I promise I won't share it with the rest of the fleet. Strictly for my personal archive. But I do think we play well together."

He raised an eyebrow, because of course he did. There was something comfortingly familiar about the gesture.

"There is no vanity in wishing to preserve art, Lieutenant," Spock said. "And you do have a beautiful voice."


End file.
